Have you set your novel aside for years but it keeps tugging you back to it? Keep thinking about a short story that’s been sitting in your drafts folder for a decade? This course is dedicated to reviving old works through deep re-visioning. We’ll strive to identify what it is about the work that keeps calling you back to it and thinking outside of the piece’s original shape to find the form that truly tells it. This may mean radically changing the story’s structure or even taking what resonates–the characters, a setting, an event–and placing it in an entirely different premise. This course isn’t for putting a bit of polish on the sentences before submitting the story. It’s for taking the work apart, rewriting it, and putting it all together in a different shape. This course will focus on participant’s projects through frequent discussion and workshopping up to 20 pages each.
A Statement of Our Values
The Attic Institute of Arts and Letters opposes the legitimation of bigotry, hate, and misinformation. As a studio for writers, we do not tolerate harassment or discrimination of any kind. We embrace and celebrate our shared pursuit of literature and languages as essential to crossing the boundaries of difference. To that end, we seek to maintain a creative environment in which every employee, faculty member, and student feels safe, respected, and comfortable — even while acknowledging that poems, stories, and essays delve into uncomfortable subjects. We accept the workshop as a place to question ourselves and to empathize with complex identities. We understand that to know the world is to write the world. Therefore, we reaffirm our commitment to literary pursuits and shared understanding by affirming diversity and open inquiry.